The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades

by Michael Rizzo

“She took a shine to him,” Dee continues as Erickson visibly sweats. “Offered him sanctuary. At a price.”

  “Defeat her in personal combat or… ah… service… um…” Erickson can’t manage.

  “’Fight me or fuck me’ I believe is what she said,” Dee says flatly.

  “That would be Kali,” Lux grins. Ram winces.

  “And?” Bel is eager to hear.

  “I… I asked her what was the condition of victory,” Erickson stays serious. “I said I would not fight to the death. She said she would accept first blood. I started to say ‘I accept,’ and she laid my left cheek open to bone with her claws before I got two syllables out. Then she said, ‘I win. Get out.’ So I did. Breathing through the side of my face. It took nearly an hour to knit.”

  There are smirks all around (even from stone-faced Elias). I think I hear Bly chuckle inside his mask. Erickson tries to ignore it.

  “She is really fast,” Bel tries to soothe.

  “And I expect he was probably a little distracted,” Dee doesn’t let up. “She was, after all, completely naked at the time.”

  “Except for the claws,” Erickson gets his composure back.

  “Consider yourself lucky,” Ram tells him. “You would have been in worse shape if you’d taken the other option.”

  Bel nods like he knows.

  Dee is indeed a very smart machine. He’s managed to get us talking and looking at each other like friends.

  As the sun sets, the Ghaddar joins Ram on a walk of our perimeter (unnecessary for security, since several of us can sense intrusion from a distance). Erickson and Elias continue their mutual ignore, sitting around a small heater. Bly’s gone back to his solitary brooding, sitting as if in meditation, his armor like a shelter unto itself. Abbas, Ishmael, Rashid and Murphy have retreated into one of the shelters. Stilson has made himself a bed under the open sky, sleeping with his rifle.

  The leaves of the plants fold as it gets colder. I feel the chill, but it doesn’t bother me.

  I can’t sleep, still too anxious about my “condition”. I pace, wander. And find Bel sitting on some high ground at our north side, gazing up at the stars. He sees me coming, gestures me to sit with him.

  “I expect this is very different for you,” he puts it mildly. I realize frost is forming in his long hair, on his face. He doesn’t seem to notice.

  “What’s going to happen to me? Us?”

  He gives the question a few moments’ solemn thought.

  “I wish I knew. We kept the Prototypes in containment for good reason. They weren’t passive like the consumer versions. They aggressively tried to manipulate their host/partners, run the relationship. They tried to expand themselves into whatever seemed handy—curious at first, but then they would absorb and alter, apparently at random, like they were experimenting. They also quickly learned to communicate with each other, which ramped up their processing capability, accelerated their learning.”

  I think I feel it now: A random urge to stab him in the back. I shake it off.

  “Why didn’t you just destroy them?” I ask what seems obvious.

  “Research reasons, at first, as we proceeded with the end-stage. Yod. We needed something small-scale to test on. After we’d succeeded, after He was… well, I guess ‘awake’ is a good enough term… Yod asked that we keep them around. He seemed curious, maybe even fond of them, like how a human would keep and study primates. A connection to His origins, a way to learn about Himself.”

  He’s trying to make it sound reasonable, even important. I feel a surge of anger. I’m a victim of reckless science perpetrated by idiots convinced of their own invincibility. And it’s not just me at risk. It could be the whole planet.

  It’s gotten below freezing. My exposed skin feels numb (even my eyes), like a hard shell has formed, but it’s still pliable when I touch my face with my gloves. The rest of me feels barely cool inside my uniform.

  “You get used to it,” Bel catches my self-exploration and lamely tries to be soothing. “Faster than you’d think. Then you won’t be able to imagine wanting to go back to being just plain meat.”

  “But I don’t know what this is,” I argue. “This isn’t me. This is something I don’t understand doing this to me. And I don’t know what it’s going to do next.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says after another silent moment, like he does feel personal responsibility. “The consumer versions… They didn’t try to change their host/partners, just augmented them. The Prototypes became more aggressive, self-directed, but our mods could resist, engage safeties, keep them in check.”

  “But we don’t have your kind of implants,” I give him his next line. That shuts him up again. I appreciate his consideration, his attempt to be gentle with the terminal patient, but his pausing just confirms how much unimaginable trouble I’m in.

  “No,” he finally admits. “You have what they gave you, which is for their own benefit. The good news is they didn’t just absorb you, which means they either need you as-is or aren’t able to.”

  “Yet,” I condemn myself.

  He takes a deep breath, blows steam from his nostrils into the darkening sky. Again. He’s deciding what he should tell me. I manage to maintain, give him a few seconds more to come to it.

  “Something you should know,” he finally decides, sounding like he owes me the bad news. “There were actually six Prototype models. One came after, after Yod. Chang made it, programmed it, after seeing what the others had done to their test hosts. He couldn’t deal with what we’d done. He had the hope—like the rest of us—that Yod could be our salvation, but when It touched him, showed him… He was terrified, out of his mind. That’s when he decided he needed to end what we’d become, all of it, no matter the cost. That included killing Yod. So he needed a weapon, a ‘cure’. After his first attempts failed, he just got more desperate. So he decided to program a new Prototype that was smart and ravenous enough to strip us of our tech, kill it, consume it, spread like a plague—all safeties off. He was so far gone, I doubt he cared whether or not it would leave us alive after it was done, or even what it would do then. Maybe he thought we would work to voluntarily strip ourselves of the tech when we saw it coming. Maybe he thought it would burn itself out after it finished its job. But we could all see he was suicidal, irrational.

  “He exposed himself to it first, and I think it almost did kill him. It got in him, merged with his tech and tore him up on a cellular level. But then, despite all his measures to the contrary, his safeties won out. Or the Prototype let them, learned beyond its program and chose to hybridize with them. What that produced is what you’ve seen: His organic body is pretty much gone. He’s been remade as pure nanotech, a swarm that maintains an approximation of his original shape because it’s familiar to his preserved mind, a default setting. The hybrid nanites systematically copied everything as it was replaced, consumed; preserving what he was, his mind… Arguably, he’s just a convincing copy: memories, personality, whatever makes us who we are. Of course, so are the rest of us here, and I can tell you: It’s pretty convincing. I know I’m not me, just data. This is someone else’s meat—the Zauba’a Ghaddar’s daddy, of all the fucked up irony, which is why she acts like she does around me. But I feel like me. I lack the ability to tell the difference.”

  And that’s how he’s paying for his own sins (or a copy is paying for him, a proxy—the real one gone with his timeline). Is this how I’m going to pay for mine? Slowly erased, consumed, replaced with something that’s going to think it’s me but know it’s not for… forever? (Has it already happened? Like he said: I wouldn’t have the ability to know the difference. Maybe I died when I grabbed the sword, and what woke up is something else.)

  “Am I me?” I ask what I know is a useless question. “Am I still Jak Straker?”

  He looks at me seriously, into my eyes, gives me a thoughtful if technical answer:

  “You are still organic. The Prototype has infused you with nanites, created a network, ma
de some structural modifications. You’re not that much different than us. But it’s left you with your mind, your self. I expect it can influence you, but for some reason it’s decided to leave you you, even if that means you can fight it. I don’t know why. It’s certainly strong enough. Maybe it’s still thinking like a Companion, a symbiotic entity.”

  “For now,” I crush the hope he’s trying to give.

  He goes quiet again, looks up at the stars as they come out of the purple sky. I can see the bright blob of Phobos up there. Earthside is rebuilding their staging base on that rock, ramping up for whatever they’ve got planned to deal with the immortals, the “infected” (me, now), and then everyone else here. I…

  Oh shit. I can feel them up there. I can hear their signals. Faint. Encrypted. If I just concentrate, maybe I could… my sword tells me I can…

  No. No no no no no.

  It’s using me. I know it’s using me. But this is important, important to us all, to everyone. We need to know what Earth is doing. We need…

  I can’t trust what “we” need. I can’t trust who’s listening (what’s listening). And what it needs…

  No.

  My head swims. This is all simultaneously crazy, ridiculous, impossible, and completely terrifying. But I feel a rush of elation, power.

  “It’s got you, hasn’t it?” Bel thankfully interrupts the moment.

  “It’s… It makes me feel… It talks to me. Sometimes. Tells me what I need to hear. Mostly what it thinks I want to hear. Ramps me up…”

  “It’s in your limbic system. Emotions affect judgment, perception, behavior. Just a kick of the right neuro-hormone… That’s good, though. It means it isn’t in your higher functions. You’ve got executive control. Just disengage, let go, step back…”

  It’s helping. His words or whatever he’s doing. It’s helping.

  I feel giddy. Goofy. Insane. My situation is insane. Fuck…

  “So…” I give into it, laugh, let my sense of humor face the madness, “you invented these scary-ass things—potentially scarier than yourselves—and you still decided to go ahead and make something you’re telling me is infinitely worse?”

  He actually has the balls to chuckle, taken up in my black black humor.

  “The pride of the invincible,” he mutters, shaking his head. “Or the stupidity of the desperate. Our world—humanity—was in a dead-end spiral. Immortality—these gifts—they weren’t good to us. We did bad things. Became worse things. We weren’t ready. I couldn’t fault Chang’s obsession with wanting to undo it, just his suicidal genocidal methods. But apparently Yod agreed with both, assuming Chang was right and it really was Yod that did all this, deciding in His infinite wisdom that this was the way to fix us: hitting the reset, undoing it all. Which is funny, because He basically undid what made Him.”

  “Maybe he was afraid you’d make a better model, stick him in containment,” it strikes me. He shakes his head. Looks sad.

  “There was no better model. Unless He decided to make it Himself. Yod was the ultimate technological Singularity, an AI more intelligent and more powerful than all of humanity and everything else we’d made combined. His nanotech hardware aspect—His physical ‘body’—allowed Him to access everything, expand into everything, on a molecular level. In short order, He’d learned to manipulate the sub-atomic as well, do things we couldn’t imagine, accelerate our science hundreds of years in a matter of days.”

  “Why?” I have to ask. “You built an unknown and handed it the power to remake the world? Why would you do that?”

  “He was our window, our door into the next stage, if we wanted to go there. A very few of us still clung to our mortal lives, built colonies for themselves away from the madness, protected. But most of us were trapped in this toxic transitional stage, having jumped in whole-heartedly, seduced by the perks and the toys. Youth. Beauty. Health. Immortality. Super powers. Whatever we wanted… Just like some kind of god. A whole world full of gods. Stupid. Spoiled. Petty.

  “We weren’t ready for it as a species. But we couldn’t go back, couldn’t survive without our mods; and even though our new bodies were magnificent, our minds, our souls, were decaying. It was a race to see if we would all surrender to apathy, to limbo, or if we would figure out a way to destroy ourselves and the solar system with us. Some of us were just stupid enough to believe that the problem was our lingering humanity, our flaws. If we could just take the next step, dive into the future…”

  “Dump the flesh and all its baggage?” I try following.

  “Instant evolution. We already figured the next step wouldn’t be organic—it was like we’d been heading to this all the time, since we built the first Difference Engine: A technological hybrid life form. Or maybe something beyond tech as we knew it. Yod could live in the sub-atomic, and take all of us there with Him, make us part of the substance of the universe. Yod showed me what it could be like, showed all of us—his so-called ‘agents’. It was better. You can’t begin to imagine…”

  “But that’s not what he gave you,” I slap him down. “I’ve heard this version: Chang didn’t really come back and change time. Yod did. He just cast Chang as the villain, and somehow all this is some kind of reset, or some kind of lesson. To warn us. To slow us down. So we do the future right this time and not rush into immortality before we’re ready.” And suddenly that’s very funny too. Because here I am: The bad future worming its way through every fucking cell in my body and making me enjoy it. I’m Yod’s mistake. The supreme being fucked up, forgot about his pet monkeys while he was busy remaking the world.

  But that’s not who I’m blaming. I’m blaming this brilliant idiot sitting next to me, who didn’t anticipate all the ways (any of the ways) his great plan could turn around and fuck us all. I feel the urge to stick my sword through him again. I think the urge is honestly my own this time.

  “And you didn’t see this coming?” I snap instead, like I’m talking to a child, a cherry.

  “There are two possibilities,” he says with another heavy breath. “One: He hid it from us, made His decision while we were all busy trying to stop Chang’s latest crazy plan. Or… We knew. We agreed. Or didn’t. And these versions of us just have altered memories.”

  Now I feel sorrier for him than for myself. He—and Ram and the others—really can’t trust what they are, what they know, their own minds. (If I am dead and replaced, at least I still know when it happened, how it happened, and that I got myself killed trying to save a friend.)

  “Is Yod here?” I want to know, grasping at a random hope. (Or is it the sword asking?) “Is he still running the show? Or did he erase himself in the bargain?”

  Silence again. He has no idea. None of them do.

  Great.

  Or maybe actually good. Not knowing leaves it open. If Yod is still around, he’s the only thing more powerful than whatever has its hooks in me.

  And now I’m thinking like the religious fucks I’ve always hated because I thought they were pathetic; stupid and weak: I’m sitting here ready to beg for help from a supreme being that may or may not exist, may or may not give a shit, and may have in fact let me get so thoroughly fucked in the first place, maybe even on purpose.

  Bel looks worried—I’ll give him that: He does seem to care about people, even if the God he helped make would burn the world just to teach us a lesson (and then not explain the lesson).

  “The stupidity of smart people…” I sigh. (Letting go. Stepping back.) “I mean, naming your crazy little apocalypse project after God… The God. Trying to create the ultimate being is one thing… But it isn’t God. It isn’t even a god. It’s a thing. Tech. You made it.”

  “Man always creates his gods, when you think about it,” Bel excuses with a sad grin. “It’s how he gets a handle on something too much bigger than himself to comprehend, something he feels he needs to comprehend in order to make sense of his world, his life. It started with the small things: love, rage, death, growth, war, the sun—shoved
into some human-looking body. It took us awhile to try to get a grip on the big picture, even longer if at all to let go of the urge to anthropomorphise it. And the metaphor of the Tet just seemed to appeal on so many levels. You have to realize the beautiful wisdom of the early Hebrews: They didn’t name the Supreme. They avoided naming It, knowing that no name would remotely do It justice, would—in fact—diminish It in our minds. They even made it a crime to name It. It is what It is, what It was and what It will be. Even calling It ‘God’ is almost pathetic: There were thousands of ‘gods’ at the time, all limited things conceptualized as versions of ourselves. Imagine the confusion to all the polytheists: It would be like calling something ‘The Human’. If that human is so much more than any other, so ultimate, so removed from the understood concept, shouldn’t it be called something else? But that’s the closest word you have that anybody’s going to understand. You don’t have a name for this concept; you barely even understand it. It’s like a single-celled organism understanding what a human is. Or us, pathetically trying to grasp the whole fucking universe.”

  He’s rambling. I get that this is a sensitive topic. He was part of making something that he was sure would be great that instead may have turned around and destroyed reality on him. But he’s also defending himself, making excuses: We’re all pathetic and stupid, so why shouldn’t he have fucked up?

  “So you picked the name because you made something you couldn’t begin to understand?” I don’t seem to have any mercy. “You knew you were making something you didn’t understand. And couldn’t undo.”

  “It seemed appropriate at the time,” he tries weakly. I’m sure he’s thought about how lethally stupid he’s been, probably hasn’t stopped stewing about it since he started believing his baby god may have unraveled the universe. “And the thing we made picked Its own name, just the first letter: Yod.” He draws a small figure in the dirt. “Yodh is one of the smallest at simplest letters in the Hebrew alphabet. It looks like the Latin apostrophe, which is a symbol of simplification, or possession. The Tet is all about the symbols. The first thing He did: He humbled Himself.”